Ethics rules with teeth in county government?

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett used his annual State of the County address last month to again raise the issue of ethics, calling on County Attorney Vince Ryan, as the county’s chief ethics official, to do more.

Specifically, Emmett said Ryan should strengthen an ethics committee created through reforms passed by Commissioners Court in 2009 (following a 2008 campaign in which Emmett and Ryan both made ethics a high priority).

Intended to answer employees’ questions and take complaints, the ethics committee met only twice, in 2009, before deciding that state law too severely hindered its work by preventing it from meeting confidentially, granting protection to whistle-blowers or having authority over elected officials or their departments.

The county attorney should work to find a solution, Emmett said, rather than let the committee sit idle. Ryan’s staff countered by saying he never agreed the committee could serve its intended purpose and that the rules adopted in 2009 were different from those he’d reviewed.

Fast-forward to today, when Ryan placed an item on Commissioners Court’s Tuesday agenda asking for permission to work with the district attorney and the county’s lobbyists to draft legislation for possible inclusion in the county’s legislative agenda. In short, the idea is to seek the changes in state law necessary to give the committee teeth.

“The ethics committee we’ve got now is really not any more than an advisory committee,” said Assistant County Attorney Doug Ray. “That’s been one of the problems with this thing – it doesn’t really have any official authority to do anything.”

Ray said getting the legislature to add Harris County to Chapter 161 of the local government code, which created an ethics committee in El Paso County, would help.

“If we had that then we could do a lot more with it,” Ray said. “We’re going to prepare a proposal for the consideration of the commissioners to ask the Legislature to amend Chapter 161 to include Harris County.”

To include the item on the legislative agenda would require the full court’s approval.

Emmett said he welcomes the effort but isn’t sure why Ryan felt the need to use an agenda item to announce he would cooperate with other county departments.